Blended fruit smoothies, milkshakes and protein shakes are becoming increasingly popular among health conscious people. In these blended drinks, fresh fruits and/or vegetables can be mixed together with, if desired, vitamins and protein supplements to provide fresh nutritious foods in a convenient, portable form.
While it is advantageous to blend carefully selected ingredients at the peak of their freshness, it is often not practical to do so. To have fresh fruits and vegetables available every day, for example, one may need to frequently go shopping for such fruits/vegetables, give the fruits/vegetables time to ripen and then make sure that the fruits/vegetables do not over ripen. Moreover, working with fresh fruits and vegetables usually generates organic wastes, is often messy and inevitably requires clean up. This means a lot of time and attention.
In a fast moving society, there is a demand for a fresh, nutritious blended drink that can be selected and prepared quickly. Better yet, such a fresh, blended drink should be available at a place that can be easily accessed, such as a convenience store or one's home.
F'Real Foods, LLC, a subsidiary of Rich Products Corporation, has made a business of making fresh, nutritious smoothies and milkshakes available at easily accessible locations, such as convenience stores. F'Real Foods starts with fresh ingredients, such as fresh fruits and milk, which it pre-blends into smoothies and milkshakes. The pre-blended smoothies and milkshakes are then hard frozen in sealed cups before they are shipped to convenience stores at many different locations. The frozen pre-blended smoothies and milkshakes are then stored in a freezer at the convenience store next to a commercial size blending machine. When the convenience store consumer wants a fresh smoothie or milkshake, the consumer simply selects the desired frozen, pre-blended smoothie or milkshake from the convenience store freezer, tears the seal off the top of the smoothie/milkshake cup and then places the smoothie/milkshake cup in a blending machine cupholder built into the blending machine. The consumer can then start the commercial sized blending machine to blend the frozen smoothie/milkshake to a desired consistency.
F'Real Foods, LLC has numerous U.S. patents and U.S. published patent applications pertaining to its commercial size blending machine and processes for preparing smoothies/milkshakes, including U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,803,377; 5,962,060; 6,041,961; 6,326,047; 6,474,862; 6,465,034; 6,527,207; 7,144,150; 7,520,658; 7,520,662 and 8,336,731 as well as U.S. Published Patent Application Nos. 2011/0088558; 2011/0088568 and 2011/0090756.
The popularity of F'Real Foods, LLC's convenience store smoothies and milkshakes has led to a demand to make the same sort of smoothies and milkshakes available for home use. Nonetheless, creating a smoothie/milkshake blender for home use poses a much different set of design problems than creating a smoothie/milkshake blender for commercial use. For example, space is often in short supply inside a kitchen at home. While a convenience store blender can be made to be tall, a homeowner will often want a blender at home to fit within a tight space between an upper kitchen cabinet and a lower kitchen cabinet. Moreover, a convenience store blender should be made of heavy duty materials, such as stainless steel, to withstand repeated, rugged use. By contrast, such a heavy duty, stainless steel blender would be too expensive for most homeowners. While homeowners appreciate having a rugged, reliable blender, they would want such a blender to be lighter in weight and less expensive than the blenders used in convenience stores. This is also true in some commercial settings where space is at a premium and money is tight. Thus, there is a demand in the art for a rugged blender for home or commercial use that is compact in size and can still blend frozen smoothies/milkshakes reliably.